Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate she has made of the number of properties which would benefit from greater investment in upper catchment measures which tackle flooding.

At a national level the Environment Agency (EA) is undertaking an assessment, as part of the Long-term Investment Scenarios, to show what future flood and coastal erosion risk management could look like over the next 50 years in England. The results will be published in 2025.

At a project level the EA assesses the range of interventions that could better protect properties, including upper catchment measures. There are around 140 projects currently in the flood and coastal defence programme that have natural flood management elements some of which relate to the upper catchment. This is in addition to the 60 pilot projects supported by the £15 million Natural Flood Management programme between 2017 and 2021. The EA estimates that this programme slowed and stored water upstream of 15,000 homes in areas at risk of flooding, equivalent to 1.6 million cubic metres of water storage.